I hate TinyURL.

I get really annoyed when people use TinyURL to point people to links online. I think it’s tacky for a business to rely on a separate service just for sending a single link – it’s like people that use AOL or Yahoo! for their businses email and not their own domain. Plus, how can you be sure a TinyURL you publish today will work tomorrow? We’re back to the whole reason for permalinks!
But I can’t get mad at the users, right? I get even more annoyed that we can’t use long links without some crappy email client chopping them in half. Why can’t it all just work!?
I had sent out some links to a blog post on a listserv and the listserv software hacked my links and a fellow list member TinyURLed my links and sent them on.
I started to think of how a blog tool could solve this problem.
In WordPress I added a quick line to my .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^post/([0-9]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?p=$1&page=$2 [QSA]
This lets me call up a post by it’s post ID number. So my usually perfectly fine sensible elegant URL for post #256, ‘Search Engines, Blog Companies Join to Combat Comment Spam’
http://easybakeweblogs.com/2005/01/18/search-engines-blog-companies-join-to-combat-comment-spam/
Becomes:
http://easybakeweblogs.com/post/256
A lot easier to email, eh? I know some will wonder why I don’t just use that all the time – I like the longer URLs because you can see what exactly you’re linking to. I may in the future drop the year, month and date from the URLs because that doesn’t seem as relevant to this site.
I added this to the WordPress documentation but it’s still under review since it contains coding (and – ahem – I’m not a coder!).


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

3 responses to “I hate TinyURL.”

  1. Sandip Bhattacharya Avatar

    Cool stuff! I was thinking of doing something like this, but you solved me a lot of nosing around. Any luck on your submission yet? I would like this to be enabled by default to wordpress’s .htaccess rules, so that it works along with the regular archive alias formats.

  2. Alexander Muse Avatar

    If you can’t use WP you might consider an alternative: You might consider using elfURL instead of TinyURL. Think TinyURL=Web1.0 :: elfURL=Web2.0. elfURL offers free stats and an RSS feed to those stats. Soon you will be able to ‘tag’ your elfURL automatically with Delicious too! Check it out, our URLs might not be ‘tiny’ but they sure are small and useful.

  3. Adrian Avatar
    Adrian

    Sometimes you want to hide referees

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *